


Strange Rivers (Starbound)

by thatsrightdollface



Series: KamiHaji Week 2018 [3]
Category: Kamisama Hajimemashita | Kamisama Kiss
Genre: AU Day, Gen, Sci-Fi, Space Station
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-16
Updated: 2018-08-16
Packaged: 2019-06-28 02:10:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,520
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15697995
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thatsrightdollface/pseuds/thatsrightdollface
Summary: There’s a mysterious woman at Mizuki’s door in the middle of the night, and she’s dragging around an extremely wounded guy with a fox tattoo.  Huh.(It’s...  A space station AU!)





	Strange Rivers (Starbound)

**Author's Note:**

> Gasp -- another entry for KamiHaji Week 2018!!! And this time... ~Space~! 
> 
> Thank you so much for reading. I truly hope your day has been/is going to be amazing!

Mizuki Yonomori had found himself dreaming about water every night, lately.  His mind was full of clear, sharp rivers, cold enough to sting your skin…  Catching the light like glass shattering over and over and over, never becoming whole.  He dreamt of stagnant lakes with secrets getting nibbled at by fish along their aching murky floors, and oceans stirred up to a stormy frenzy by some woman with a gauzy veil draped over her horns.  The waters followed him from sleep cycle to sleep cycle, in all their forms, with all their feelings and purposes…  Though of course Mizuki hadn’t actually seen much water in any one place for a long, long time.  Not since he’d left Earth, for sure, and probably not since a while before that, too, given how strange the world had gotten before it was lost.

The space station was a huge, sterile thing, for the most part – with a slimy underbelly Mizuki avoided wherever he could help it, of course.  You know.  There were the polished hallways and velvety suites along the upper decks, and then a maze of sticky floors beneath, where drugs from worlds Mizuki had never been to pulsed like liquid jellyfish under people’s skins.  Where the wild, broken things ended up, sometimes never unplugging themselves from their simulation headsets – until their skins withered and their teeth fell out, Mizuki’d heard – and the dead sometimes got stuffed into unsuspecting air vents.

Mizuki kept to the upper floors, of course.  He dreamt of rivers that had stopped racing long ago and kept the shrine he and his lady ran clean and gleaming.  People still needed their gods, even beyond Earth.  Beyond dirt, and searching roots, and bright waters deep enough to drown in.  Different gods, sometimes, but not always.

The station replicated its own sake just the way it replicated food and medicine, new limbs and ship parts…  Plenty of pulled-from-the-ether sake was sold in bars and restaurants scattered throughout the halls.  On some decks, you couldn’t walk twenty paces without seeing an advertisement for the stuff, but people who lived around their floor said Mizuki’s was still better.  He brewed it at home just like he’d done on Earth, and sometimes he smoothed flippy pale hair behind his ear and poured cups and cups and cups out, for himself, for his lady, for their gathered friends.  He’d learned how to mix drinks, too, even if the chemical burn still caught in his throat, sometimes.

The sprawl of cold stars all around them _could_ have been something like an ocean, in the end.  Their station could’ve been a port, with ships docking all the time and little village rivalries between the deck maintenance committees.  But Mizuki didn’t dream of hollow, possibly long-dead starlight.  He dreamt of something that felt more real – more himself, somehow – and when he told his lady about how he felt like maybe there was something else he was supposed to be…  Something to do, something tied to the water and their old, left-behind Earth…  She’d just said that it made a lot of sense.  Said he was probably right, even if she couldn’t explain why.

Who could know?

Mizuki was sleeping – dreaming of himself as a vast white serpent, part of the river and feeling sunlight smooth over his scales in a way the station’s chandeliers and dozens of flickering false suns could never quite manage – when the young woman pounded on his station room door.  Her voice was a kind of honest…  A kind of desperate…  Mizuki hadn’t heard in a long time.  It felt almost like she thought she was drowning.

“Please,” the woman called.  “No one else is answering!  Please, we need help.”

And so Mizuki stood, brushing down his clothes and shuffling off his futon into the dark of the room he shared with his lady.  She had ribbons and bangles hung on silvery hooks along their walls – one of the pendants was a softly coiling snake, and Mizuki thought it looked like it was smiling up at him sort of knowingly.  The strange woman beyond their door had come to the keepers of his lady’s shrine for help, and it seemed fair that Mizuki would see what he could do for her.  See what was happening, and why something in the artificial air smelled just a little burned.  A little rotten, now, where it had smelled like simulated plum tree flowers as he fell asleep.

Mizuki had hung curtains up soon after he and his lady moved in on that station, to shield their room from the unchanging, relentless starscape beyond their window.  Now, the curtains had shifted open just a little bit, and he could see a great, transluscent creature wavering by outside the station.  No one had figured out how to communicate with those beings yet, not consistently, but sometimes they mirrored back human faces if they caught sight of you through the glass.

He smiled at it, just a defiant, sleepy little half-grin, and turned back to the knocking at his door.

Mizuki opened the station room and found _her_ huddled there, then, bent over someone wild and strange…  Someone with a steaming wound in his chest, spreading out like noxious calligraphy under his skin.

“What’s happened here?” Mizuki asked.  He glanced down the hallway at a winding trail of poison and blood from where this girl had dragged her limp, shaking “friend…”  This man with ragged breath and almost no pulse at all, by now.  Their trail was nearly like a river all on its own, only smoking against the carpet.  It made an awful sense that she’d been turned away from so many doors.  It didn’t look like she had enough cash to her name to get the guy admitted into a hospital unit, and if Mizuki had to guess he wouldn’t have said she carried a room key from around there, either.

“I don’t know,” the young woman said.  Her soft hair was trailing in her face, and stains along the back of her sweater made it pretty clear she’d been trying to prop this torn-up man over her back.  “I found him like this.  I was trying to – trying to make camp –”

Make camp?  Ah, so Mizuki had been right.  No room key.  No hallway of her own to stumble down in the dead of night, carrying a broken stranger.

Perhaps it was cruel of him – it was cold, certainly – but Mizuki considered what might happen if he slipped the door closed, then.  This wasn’t his fight.  Whatever the man had done to get himself broken in such an unearthly way seemed like the sort of business best kept to itself.  But Mizuki represented his lady’s shrine, in the end.  His lady would have pulled this unlucky pair inside, and so he should do that, too.  Mizuki’s lady would have set on this mystery like a good crossword puzzle, and so…  You know.  For her, Mizuki told himself.  For her.

But _honestly_ , maybe he’d been doomed the minute he saw the blood on the poor girl’s flowery sweater and the panic in her eyes.  Had he ever seen someone so beautifully earnest?  She was shaking.  She might’ve just involved herself with a crooked crime lord from the deepest ruinous halls of that station, but Mizuki got the feeling a woman like this would’ve tried to rescue him, even if she’d known.  Whatever came next.

It would’ve been wise to nod sadly and close the door behind him.  It would’ve been wise to head straight back to sleep with the ethereal face-borrowers shifting outside the window, but that wasn’t what Mizuki did.  The girl’s name was Nanami Momozono, it turned out.  He made her some tea as his lady studied the broken man’s wounds.  He offered to put her sweater through the wash, and helped her scrub their hallway clean in case something followed the sour trail, followed it up from a dark, relentless underworld and all the way to their door.

In the center of their station room, the stranger clung to life only a little – only barely.  Mizuki’s lady was slipping off the guy’s flamboyant, tattered coat, tutting under her breath.  His skin was ashy beneath the oozing, poison writings, but Mizuki could still make out a flaming fox tattooed across his back.  The fire was blue and relentless.  The fox’s eyes were dark and laughing.  Nearly _too_ laughing, Mizuki thought.

He didn’t realize what it meant, yet.

But the trouble would come for them soon enough.  Maybe Mizuki knew _that_ , already, somewhere deep in his bones.  Knew it the same way he knew his tie to long-dead waters…  The same way he knew his place at his lady’s side. But even if he had realized exactly who Tomoe was – even if he had known what sort of mess they’d all just gotten themselves mixed up in – he liked to think he still would’ve brought Nanami in out of the hall.  Nanami thanked him as if she trusted him already, and Mizuki would’ve been lying if he said that didn’t leave him biting down a smile.


End file.
